Jeanne visibly flinched.
“They wouldn’t let you and Jim out of the inlet,” she said softly.
Neil hesitated. “Cowards and lovers will always find a way,” he said.
Jeanne gazed at him, flushed, and then impulsively threw herself into his arms. She squeezed him, burying her head against his chest. She felt his arms tightening fiercely around her. After half a minute, aware of Skippy tugging gently at her skirt and murmuring her name, she looked up, tears in her eyes.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“Then don’t,” Neil whispered to her.
“Everything okay, Jeanne?” came Jim’s voice from close behind her. Still in Neil’s arms, when she turned and saw him, the image of Frank in his boyish face reminded her of all the complications and uncertainties involved in her staying with Neil.
She looked back up at Neil, saw his feeling for her, but pulled herself roughly out of his arms.
“Good-bye, Neil,” she said and brushed past Jim out into the rain.
After she had gone, Neil turned to see Macklin sitting behind him with a cynical smile.
“Well, captain,” he said softly. “Nothing like a little pussy to turn a solid upstanding Annapolis man into a deserter, is there?”
Neil went at him, his fists clenched, but when Macklin ducked and cowered on the settee, he checked himself and strode to the back of the wheelhouse to watch Jim and Jeanne drift out of sight on shore. She was gone. He stood there silently for half a minute.
“I thought you said I lacked heart,” he finally said.
“Oh, you do, you do,” Macklin agreed affably, “but I never said you lacked cock.”
“Thank you,” said Neil and then went quickly down into the main cabin to find Olly.
He wanted both to be rid of Macklin and also to advise Olly on taking care of Vagabond before Neil himself reported for duty. He had decided to proceed directly to one of the ships in the turning basin and find out what the military situation was and whether he was really needed or not. For him, as for Jim, the war was madness and both sides insane, but the U.S. Navy, insane or not, was his team, and if the game were still being played, he had reluctantly decided it was his duty to take the field.
Even Captain Olly seemed depressed as Neil went over the boat with him. Neil had requested, and the others had agreed, that the remaining food aboard should stay aboard for at least the next few days. Neil told Olly where Jim had hidden their emergency food supply. He also showed Olly where the two pistols were hidden behind the partition in Jeanne’s cabin; he showed him the five-gallon jerry jug of diesel fuel lined up with the water containers and now labeled “Water.” Since pirates were still a threat, Olly had disconnected the battery cables from the engine and hid both the cables and the two ignition keys, letting only Neil know their hiding place. In addition,
Olly decided to stash one of the two pistols in the galley where he could reach it on short notice.
When they had finished going over the boat, Olly stopped in the rain in the side cockpit and began chuckling.
“You sure don’t act like a man who’s leaving his boat forever,” he said.
“I wish I weren’t,” Neil said.
“You joining the Navy?”
“If they need me.”
“Who’s gonna decide? Them or you?”
Neil shrugged.
“Me,” he answered.
“Then I’ll keep the tea water hot,” said Olly, smiling.
“Cynical old bastard, aren’t you?” Neil shot back, smiling in spite of himself.
“I figure you got too much sense to get involved in a war where if you don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes, you’ll die of old age without firing a shot.”
“I already fought in that kind of war,” Neil said.
“And loved it, didn’t you?” Olly said, ducking into the wheelhouse out of the wind and rain, leaving Neil to face a rush of gloom.
Frank, already depressed by his confrontation with Jim and by his lingering nausea, was overwhelmed by what he found on land. His first encounter with chaos and panic came when he and Macklin, carrying Seth between them on the stretcher, left Vagabond late that morning. Frank, in the lead, had not even gotten his feet on the dock when a man in a wet, wrinkled business suit, his graying hair plastered to his forehead, accosted him.
“Are you the owner of the trimaran?” the man asked. A woman and three children stood behind the fortyish man watching intently.
“Yes, I am,” Frank replied as he waited for Macklin to lower himself and his end of the stretcher onto the dock.
“I want to book passage for myself and family on a boat going south,” the man said, his drawn face belying his calm voice.
“I can’t help you,” Frank answered dully. “We’re not going south, and if we were, we’d have a full boat already.”
“I have gold,” the man said, lowering his voice. “Fifteen thousand dollars’ worth. You’ll need it wherever you’re going.”
When Macklin put his end of the stretcher momentarily on one end of a bench, Frank rested his on a nearby railing and looked at the man with surprise.
“Well, you’re fifteen thousand dollars richer than I am,” he said. “But I still can’t help you. A trimaran can’t take the extra weight.” Despite the rain, five or six other people had clustered around and were listening to this exchange.
“Then take just my wife and children,” the man said. “They don’t weigh much, and they can sleep on deck.”
“No, Harry,” the woman interjected. “I’m not going anyplace without you. I won’t.”
“We’re not going south, I’m afraid,” Frank repeated, depressed that a man should be so desperate to leave this place that he was willing to sacrifice himself to get his family on a boat. Depressed too that he couldn’t help.
“Let’s go try somewhere else,” whispered the wife.
Harry, sensing Frank’s sympathy, kept staring, the woman tugging at his arm, the youngest_ child tugging at hers, the rain streaming down everyone’s faces.
“How about me, captain?” another man asked. “I’m all alone. I’m a good—”
“Me, too!” shouted a woman from the back of the small group. The crowd pushed toward Frank, shouting and holding up money, but picking up the stretcher, he and Macklin plunged roughly through the crowd and strode away.
At the hospital Seth was put on a mat on a garage floor. No doctor or nurse or administrator seemed to know who was responsible for the patients in Barnaby’s Ford Garage, and so none of the seven patients lying around the room, some on mats used by the mechanics to work under cars, were being treated. They were out of the wind and rain: that was their treatment.
Macklin had quickly disappeared, and Frank crossed the street to the main hospital grounds to find a doctor. He saw a bulldozer digging up one whole section of the side lawn in the rain, an act which struck Frank as senseless. He assumed it was part of some long-range construction program. There were large tarpaulins covering what he thought were building materials, until he saw two soldiers carrying a body on a stretcher out into the rain, across the still untouched section of lawn, and then dumping the body unceremoniously in the mud next to the tarpaulin. An hour later, when he finally left the hospital, the cover had been removed and a pile of corpses was being bulldozed into a muddy hole.
Inside the hospital he discovered there were only three doctors left for all of Morehead City. All the other local doctors had been called up by the Army to serve elsewhere. One doctor was asleep, having just put in his fifth consecutive nineteen-hour day, or close to it. The second was a surgeon working in the OR on those with serious injuries, mostly burns. The third was a pediatrician, who was acting physician for the other thousand or so patients located either here or in the refugee center.